![]() Other books and publications (catalogs, magazines, newspapers, comics, etc.) are really problems for ePub. ![]() Ultimately, ePub is good for books with linear flow - books that you read from front to back without a lot of moving back and forth. And InDesign is not going to be nearly as helpful as you think you’re almost certainly going to have to do a bunch of manual coding. You can make a pretty ePub, but you have to work far too hard at it. But using ePub is like taking a step back about 15 years: Fonts are a problem, graphics are a problem, typography is a problem, and the biggest problem of all is that you have no idea what the book will look like on various devices because every device displays ePub files differently.ĮPub is an XML-based format - basically just HTML with limited CSS. It’s an limited, crufty file format that has been pressed into service only because there’s nothing else better. Okay, so how do you get InDesign content onto an iPad? There are five basic ways:ĮPub has gotten a huge amount of press recently, and some publishers think it’s supposed to be the holy grail of ePublishing. I’ll go into detail on those issues below. But very little attention has been given to a format that I consider even more important: PDF. Most of the hoopla over the iPad has centered on the fact that SWF (Flash) won’t run on an iPad. How does the iPad handle those formats? Well, in the case of two of them (PDF and SWF), the answer is “pretty darn poorly.” The iPad came on the scene when the publishing world had finally pretty much settled on three major standards for displaying interactive content: XHTML, PDF, and SWF. So because of this success, many people feel that the iPad is the target to hit - the device on which their content must appear. ![]() (And estimates indicate that Apple may be selling over 200,000 per week - more iPads than Macs!) That counts for something. That said, Apple did ship the iPad and sold over a million of them in a few weeks. Many announcements don’t even appear to be turning into real products, but no matter… everyone feels the need to jump out and do something. The point is that every company seems to be throwing their hat into the ring, coming out with something new and exciting and hoping that their idea will stick. Where We Are TodayĪfter talking to a number of colleagues about this topic, and reading everything I can about it, one quote stands out for me… something that Branislav Milic said to me while in Seattle: I obviously, cannot repeat the whole session, but here’s the general outline. The session was very short and focused on the various methods for putting content on an iPad (content from InDesign, at least). ![]() I presented a session called “InDesign to iPad” at the InDesignSecrets Print and ePublishing Conference, May 13, and have heard from a number of people that it would be useful to repeat some of this information here. ![]()
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